10 ms·
Moore's law hits the roof
- rdancer 11y agoHave you lost an apostrophe somewhere?
- paulsutter 11y agoThe most important new code is massively parallel. Using GPUs today but surely new architectures soon. The human brain is highly parallel, so no surprise there. Look how tiny the source code to Deepmind's general Atari player. It's a completely different model from traditional development: https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/ https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/
- sushirain 11y agoYou are right. If deep learning takes more and more of the processing, we will need GPUs or more CPU cores, not necessarily clock speed.
- chrishawn 11y agoBut wouldn't quantum computing qualify? Seems short sited to just focus on Intel
- tfgg 11y agoGiven that Moore's law is about transistor densities, no I don't think quantum computers would qualify. It also seems premature to talk about about a Moore's law equivalent for the cost/density of quantum gates given we can barely build more than a handful at a time (D-Wave 'quantum' computers aren't quantum gate computers and don't scale in the same way).
- cft 11y agoThat probably means there will be no "web 3.0". Not sure how to monetarily benefit from this prediction. The next tech boom may be in biology driven by cheap sequencing and its data.
- yo-code-sucks 11y agoYou mean the Semantic Web? It's here.
- elorant 11y agoFrom another point of view perhaps we finally might have to start writing better code instead of solving software issues with better hardware.
- chillaxtian 11y agobased on historical evidence, a dedicated chip for executing javascript will be created before the industry makes a concerted effort to find a better tool.
- wolfgke 11y ago> a dedicated chip for executing javascript will be created Unluckily this is not so easy: If you know a way, Yossi Kreinin would be really interested to know: > http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html And here is a list of ideas/problems that he identified within "the usual suspects": > http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html
- hamiltonkibbe 11y agoYou just replace the "C" transistors with "Javascript" transistors
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- k__ 11y agoMost people are simply value oriented if it comes to programming languages. I worked in many companies that would consider stuff like Java too "enterprisey". In 2006 most employers said "There is an abundance of PHP coders, why should I switch to something more expensive?!" Now they say this about JavaScript. And devs think "Well, lets learn something to make money with. Since there are some much JavaScript jobs, lets learn it!" I did so myself and made good money.
- interdrift 11y agoThat could be good for us.It means its time for innovation.
- emsy 11y agoYou already see innovation from Intel to segment the market so that they can maximize profit without increasing processing speed (for example the way they artificially separate their server from their desktop CPUs). In the long run I hope you're right (and AMD is able to catch up)
- frik 11y agoLet's hope AMD and various ARM CPU vendors catch up. Intel Xenon are overpriced i7 with enabled ECC memory. And we are stuck with ~3GHz single core raw speed since 2004 (memory got faster, etc - we know!). We would benefit from 10GHz single core performance.
- emsy 11y agoDefinitely! https://twitter.com/reubenbond/status/662061791497744384 https://twitter.com/reubenbond/status/662061791497744384
- krisoft 11y agoThat sounds like Moore law is not propelled by innovation. It's not the expanding universe which causes our transistor counts to double, it's engineers innovating.
- marcosdumay 11y agoIf you mean innovation in software, yes, that's probably the time for that. If you mean innovation in specialized hardware, it's just too early. Those last iterations of fab improvement threw the prices over the roof, everything is expensive now. If Moore's law is really over, things will get cheap as they get stale, but not now. If you mean innovation on fabrication, well, there's still some fat to cut on power consumption, and if one comes out with an absolutely flawless process, higher frequencies are still possible. But overall, one can not innovate against the laws of Nature.
- zappo2938 11y agoI read this on a $149 Chromebook wondering why do I need a faster processor? Sure the servers this ARM processor powered computer is connecting with in the cloud are powered by Intel processors but the optimizations at this point are in the software.
- bognition 11y agoBill gates (supposedly) asserted that no one would ever need more than 640K of RAM. Sometimes it's hard to understand the need for newer tech until you have it.
- dudul 11y agoIs it hard to accept that other people use computers differently than you do and may need faster processors?
- coldtea 11y agoYes (it is hard). Since those "other" are not that many -- most people just do web, text processing, Excel, mails, gaming etc, for which cpu power is plenty. Now, even if we take some specialized tasks that need more CPU (but are niche anyway): - For image processing, we had Photoshop doing wonders since at least 2000. And with SSDs, we can view and edit 30+ MP images today faster than we could 8K images back in 2000 (and on 4K displays nowadays). We can very much cover all things web and print just fine. - For video processing, a fast latest box can edit several streams of 4K with live filters. That's beyond what $200,000 professional boxes could do in the early nineties. - For audio processing, a MacBook Pro i7 can run more audio channels and effects than what the consoles used for Thriller or The Wall had in million dollar professional studios. We also need to understand the concept of diminishing returns. E.g. It's not like having an NLE rendering time down from 2 hours to 1 minute will enable us to make more movies. It will just save some editing studios and amateurs some time. Other processes involved in movie making (like just setting the lights appropriately for a shoot) trump this "optimization" many times over. So it's not like people "need" faster processors. It's more like they would be "nice to have". Now, for things like HPC for research etc, could indeed use faster processors -- but that's an even more niche market.
- jp555 11y agoAs far as where to innovate, how about engineering wifi/3G/LTE to use less than 700mW of power? The smartphone is the first universal tech for mankind, and CPU is not the bottleneck there, it's screens & radios, all batteries being equal of course.
- paulddraper 11y agoAlso: better batteries. That helps smartphones and electric cars.
- pjc50 11y agoPower per bit per km from tower is slowly decreasing there, but it requires a new clever noise floor hack for each generation. For a given modulation scheme, the power required to reliably transmit one bit a specific distance is effectively fixed by the laws of physics.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoMaybe we'll finally get some interesting processor architectures. The race for ever more speed has its reasons, but it's not been built on a particularly helpful abstraction layer.
- JumpCrisscross 11y agoWhen Intel says 10nm, does that actually mean 10nm (as in twenty [EDIT: fifty] Si-atoms wide)? Or is it an industrial term of art?
- mchannon 11y agoYes, it actually does mean 10nm wide, though it can often refer to the minimum feature size (as in not every part of the chip is 10nm wide, just some of them). Since there's more than just silicon to a chip, those features can often be of metallic atoms, which can be smaller than Si, and hence more than 20 atoms wide.
- thechao 11y agoThe answer to the second unasked question is, if cost were no barrier, then the lower bound for our current class of tech is almost certainly an effective feature size of ~1.5nm, or about 5 or 6 generations. When I'm feeling bullish (usually after talking to my boys at Intel) I feel confident we'll eventually see 3nm. I suspect something more exotic will intercept by then, and carry after that in effective feature size reduction. Of course, by then, my hot-air-lifting-body-balloon unicorn will have realized, so I won't care =)
- Scarblac 11y agoIf a Si-atom is 0.2nm, that would appear to translate to fifty atoms.
- scholia 11y agoSee: The Status of Moore's Law: It's Complicated http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-status-of-moores-law-its-complicated http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-status-o...
- peter303 11y agoI remember reading this in 1980s.
- whistlerbrk 11y agoIn the 1980s we werent hitting the physical limits of the size of individual atoms though. Those gates can only be so big, right?
- yogthos 11y agoWe're very far from hitting any theoretical limits. We're just hitting speed limits for silicon. Meanwhile, we already know several substrates that outperform silicon by orders of magnitude. Here are a few off top of my head: graphene http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175727-ibm-builds-graphene-chip-thats-10000-times-faster-using-standard-cmos-processes http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175727-ibm-builds-graphen... spintronics: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428883/a-spintronics-breakthrough/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428883/a-spintronics-br... photonics: http://www.gizmag.com/photonic-quantum-computer-chip/38928/ http://www.gizmag.com/photonic-quantum-computer-chip/38928/ memristors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor There's no theoretical breakthrough needed to use these technologies, it's simply a matter of moving them from the lab to mass production. So far there has been little incentive as companies are still squeezing out the last bits of juice from silicon, but as we start hitting the limits it's only a matter of time until these technologies get phased in.
- anaip1 11y agoThe time for Elixir is coming near! :)
- eliben 11y agoAgner is legendary, but this piece is too Intel-focused. It operates under the assumption that only Intel can push the industry forward. Yes, we're unlikely to see a lot of further process reductions with Silicon, and yes power is a problem; but this is a large market with many powerful players, and assuming that it will stall because Intel stalls is extremely short-sighted.
- cma 11y ago>We can assume that Intel have no plans of making vector registers bigger than 2048 bits because they would not fit the 64-bit mask registers. Yeah.. seems overly specific and fatalistic.
- scholia 11y agoThe reality, at the moment, is that Intel may well be the only company that can push the industry forward. Each time you introduce a new processor node, the cost of the fab goes up dramatically, and now we're talking about $14 billion for the next Samsung fab. (This is Rock's Law.) If you go back a few years, there were a couple of dozen chip manufacturers around the leading edge, including Toshiba, Siemens, Sony, Fujitsu, NEC and Philips. With each new step, one or two of these companies can't find or justify the money to build a very expensive fab for the next process, so they drop out. Today, we're down to four or five: Intel, TSMC, Global Foundries (ex AMD+IBM), Samsung and maybe Europe's STM. So Toshiba, Siemens, Sony, Fujitsu, NEC, Philips and several others have all dropped out. Which of the four or five leading companies have got both the money and the need to keep pushing on? Looks to me like Intel and Samsung. The only other option I can see is Apple putting a ton of money into TSMC, which current makes most of its money fabricating chips for mid-market companies like Mediatek. That's a possibility because it would stop Apple from being too reliant on Samsung. Rock's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock's_law
- eliben 11y agoBut Intel is far from being the richest tech company out there. What's $14bln for Apple with $100s of billions of cash in the bank? It's not that much for Google either, and and other tech giants.
- ninjakeyboard 11y agoI think Akka is sort of heading in the right direction in its ubiquitous language. Akka talks about itself in terms of solving the "distribution problem" - not necessarily across machines but machines OR cores. It talks about "location transparency" as a first principle meaning that an actor/worker that processes a message can be either on another CPU or another physical machine and the location of that actor is transparent from the perspective of the code - it's a deployment/configuration concern. It's convenient that multicore utilization is a scale problem at the same that utilizing networked compute resources (ie in the cloud) is scale problem resources because we might be able to treat them as similar problems. Yes the network introduces some other unique qualities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...) but apart from reliability assertions it's an interesting observation that they can be treated similarly if message passing mechanics are abstracted. eg they both fit asynchronous, event driven paradigms. both need elimination of shared state to not make errors in your code (required over the network). Multicore concurrency in code isn't too hard but threads/locking are probably the wrong abstraction. Similarly, functional approaches might be a better "default" approach for a concurrent world.
- tracker1 11y agoFunctional approaches are definitely better regarding concurrency, and distribution... if you can ship the state and the operation/function where there is availability, it can run anywhere. More complex OO relationships aren't as portable. Of course MQ systems have their own cost, on-system or across systems. That said, the fastest computers over the past 5 years or so aren't much faster, but the power usage is much less... For example, the i5-6200u is an absolute beast of a machine for its' power consumption. This is great for server-side computing, where virtualization and other isolation strategies for allowing shared resources work well. I don't know that we really need too much more in terms of "faster" ... the problems to be solved at this point are absolutely in systems solutions that are distributed and those communication channels. Google can deliver results of a query amazingly fast... We're going to reach a point where communication networks reach nearly every inch of livable space, and all information is (virtually) within arms length. (divergent rambling ahead) There are bigger issues at hand... that being physical transportation... we (in the U.S. and many other places) have more pavement for cars that we do housing space. There are optimizations to be had in the physical world that are far more pressing than if computing can get another 4-5 cycles out of moore's law. The costs of food, medication are growing kind of insane the past few years. We're pushing for younger education to the point that little kids are washing out and doing worse, instead of being little kids. On the flip side, they're so isolated that they can't handle genuine pressure/stress later in life. It's a messed up world.
- wyldfire 11y ago> Intel is also catering to the market for supercomputers for scientific use. Intel's Knight's Corner ... a small niche market ... RAM speed is now often a serious bottleneck. Many of the scientific supercomputing applications are migrating to GPU workloads with OpenCL and CUDA. One enormous benefit of making this migration is the extremely fast memory that's available on GPUs.
- woodchuck64 11y ago> Another possible improvement is to include a programmable logic device on the CPU chip. Given that, earlier this year, Intel plunked down 16 billion to buy #2 FPGA maker Altera, this might turn out to be the most interesting improvement.
- dennisgorelik 11y agoHow come losing money is an improvement?
- woodchuck64 11y ago> How come losing money is an improvement? Purchasing a company is not necessarily "losing money" unless no synergy is possible between core competences. But in fact, Altera/Intel's respective core competences suggest programmable logic devices next to high-speed multi-core CPUs may be one way to keep Moore's law going (See http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20140624-intel/ http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20140624-intel/ for example).
- Animats 11y agoThere are three main limits, and several secondary ones. The big one is heat. As densities go up, so do power consumption and heat dissipation for active cells. Inactive cells are OK, which is why the highest density devices are now flash memories. That doesn't help CPUs. The next is fab cost. As someone else pointed out, state of the art fabs cost billions now, and there are fewer ones with each generation. Finally, of course, sizes are getting close to the atomic level. Secondary limits include electromigration (the atoms won't stay where you put them as they're pulled on by electric fields) and even X-rays not being short enough for mask etching. Heat is the biggest problem. CPUs aren't that big; you can fit a thousand in a shoebox if you can cool them. The Bitcoin ASIC business is a worst case. Those devices need no external memory and very little I/O, but most of the gates toggle on every cycle. Mining farms are now located in cold climates near cheap power stations.
- yazaddaruvala 11y ago> A likely development will be to put the RAM memory on the same chip as the CPU (or at least in the same housing) in order to decrease the distances for data transmission. I've been waiting for this for 5 years, I don't know why it hasn't happened already. - Optimized clock speeds, layouts, improved connectivity (i.e. increased number of RAM channels) -- Reduced latency -- Increased bandwidth - Would there even be a need for an MMU? -- CPUs wouldn't need to work with a variety of RAM types -- i.e. Less complexity, fewer points of failure The only cons: - RAM size would not be configurable Meanwhile, for better or worse, the majority of consumers can't re-configure their own RAM (Laptops/Smartphones), or on a desktop they don't know how. Businesses would either buy beefy hardware that suited their constraints or spend money on custom configurations. So this con only really effects hobbyists.
- nordsieck 11y agoThe reason this will never happen in the way you're imagining it, is yields. 16 GB of ram is just too much die area. In a small way, this has already happened, though. The intel Iris Pro has 1.5 GB of basically 4th level cache, shared between the GPU and the CPU. I could see memory on the package, though, which might generate some of the benefits you're looking for.
- yazaddaruvala 11y agoInteresting! Given that RAM is relatively simple, I wouldn't have expected yields to be such an issue. Also, since the marginal cost of a CPU is relatively low, I figured again, it wouldn't be a large hit to Intel's bottom line to overcome the yields or to give out new chips through warranty. Remember that for buyers, RAM and CPUs are marked up significantly. A combined CPU RAM unit, would be justified to have increased price over just a CPU. As long as CPU-RAM Unit cost <= CPU + RAM, buyers wouldn't mind and society would end up better as a whole. Potentially making it worthwhile for Intel, regardless of loss in yield. I am not very educated on the subject though, so I'll defer to your knowledge on it, and agree.
- Narishma 11y ago> The intel Iris Pro has 1.5 GB of basically 4th level cache, shared between the GPU and the CPU. You mean 128 MB?
- whatssttsypu 11y agoIf I had unlimited power, I'd have builds recompiling constantly, AI running and storing and analyzing results. It would be awesome!